On July 4th, 2006, I embarked on a quest to become the pre-eminent American portrait painter of the 21st century. This blog chronicles that journey. With apologies to Joan Didion, I call it THE YEAR OF MAGICAL PAINTING.

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Crazy People

You, as they say, do the math...

Two photos. The first taken quite recently (I believe) of Marvin Wilson, executed in Texas yesterday despite being declared mentally retarded.

This from the Daily Beast:

At 6:27 local time, Marvin Wilson was executed in Texas. The Supreme Court denied on Tuesday a stay of the execution on the grounds that Wilson was mentally retarded. Marvin Wilson was convicted of beating Jerry Williams, a police informant, and then shooting him in the head and neck at close range in November 1992. Wilson’s lawyers said their client has a low IQ of 61 and never progressed beyond the elementary-school level in reading and math. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that mentally deficient defendants couldn’t be put to death, but left it up to the states to determine the threshold.

This would be Mr. Wilson:

This, of course, is "Inverted Perry," my portrait of the current Texas Governor and former contestant for the Republican nomination for president.

There's actually more written on the painting, but my computer crashed a few months ago and it's hard to drill into my backup hard drive and get the damned thing. All of which is unimportant, to a degree, since the salient annotation is clearly visible under my signature/date on the upper right hand corner.

This from "Inverted Perry":

If the State of Texas is executing retarded people willy-nilly, I don't see the harm in stringing up Bernanke. At least he knows what he's doing.

The price of this painting just went up to $125,000. Buy it now and I'll take ten percent off.

Brief personal aside: It should be noted that the horns seen on the Perry painting appeared during the annotation process, and are not part of my original painting. That, howsoever appropriate, would have been inappropriate, given my quasi-journalistic sobriquet, The Painter of Record.